Andrew Jakubowicz on repairing our ‘fragile’ multicultural nation

Social cohesion in Australia has been under serious pressure in the last few years. The deadly October 7 attacks on Israel two years ago and the ensuing war in Gaza have pulled at the fabric of Australian society.

Added to these pressures are increasing anti-immigration rhetoric, including anti-immigration protest marches and Liberal rebel Andrew Hastie saying he felt Australians were becoming “strangers” in their own country because of immigration.

Joining the podcast this week is the University of Technology Sydney’s Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Andrew Jakubowicz. Jakubowicz is an expert on multiculturalism, who’s been involved in many documentaries, studies and reports – and who describes multiculturalism in Australia today as “fragile, but under repair”.

Jakubowicz says while we’ve dealt with multiculturalism issues as a nation for generations, the recent Middle East conflict has raised “the tideline of hate speech”.

We’ve always had issues around questions of intergroup relations. And I go back long enough to be able to remember the Indo-Chinese, the first arrival of the Muslims, the struggles which broke out in Australia when the Yugoslav Federation broke up.

[…] Multiculturalism, when it’s worked best, recognises those tensions and then tries to resolve them through an equitable incorporation of people into the life of the community. And most of the time that works. We’ve not really been challenged in quite the way we are being challenged at the moment by what’s occurring in the Middle East […] It’s really hard, much harder than anything we’ve had to deal with before.

The issues in the Middle East […] affect two broad communities very intensely. They affect everyone else, not so much […] But the effect of that conflict is to generally raise […] the tideline of hate speech in the society. And that’s very, very difficult to manage.

On where multiculturalism is today, Jakubowicz says there’s been a breakdown in trust within some communities.

I think the level of tension and particularly between some communities is very much higher than it’s been. But we’ve already seen issues around the sort of levels of multicultural trust during COVID. There were many communities who felt very badly done by during the COVID pandemic lockdowns, which already eroded the trust.

[…] Multicultural societies, in fact, all societies, more or less, or democratic ones, work on the basis of how much trust there is between people […] The higher the level of trust, the more […] ‘social capital’ there is that you can build on.

Jakubowicz says some of the federal government’s current approach – such as setting up a ministry of multicultural affairs under Anne Aly, and a separate office of social cohesion under a different minister, Tony Burke – was “bizarre” and created “a structure for dynamic inertia”.

Jakubowicz also shares his thoughts on the two reports given to the government by its envoys to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia.

They’re very different documents in the way they’re structured and they think about the world […] I think what they do extremely well is they capture the sense of pain and astonishment and shock and fear which exists in both the Jewish and Muslim communities at the moment.

[…] What I find the most interesting is that neither of them really […] recognise the pain of others in the society. They look well at the pain of those for whom they’re concerned, but they don’t recognise that we live in a society in which other people feel pain for other reasons. And that developing collaborations between different communities depends initially at least on both sides recognising and respecting the sort of pain that the others have.

And if you don’t do that, you end up with something which is far too inward looking and which fails to adequately recognise that we have to have a society in which people collaborate – not in which they spend their time screaming at each other.